The Beige Wall of AI Productivity
We're living through the great flattening. AI has turned our digital landscape into one enormous corporate conference room, painted in that peculiar shade of beige that interior designers probably call "professional taupe" but which really just screams "we've given up." Everything sounds the same. Everything reads the same. We're drowning in a sea of algorithmic mediocrity, and the lifeguards are all ChatGPT.
The irony isn't lost on me that I'm writing about this problem while simultaneously worrying whether you'll think this was AI-generated. Such is the paranoia of our age.
The Great Punctuation Casualty
I used to write with a certain flair. Semicolons in places they had no business being; parenthetical asides that wandered off topic (much like my conversations at dinner parties); and a liberal use of ellipsis that suggested I was always about to say something more profound than I actually was...
These days? I write like I'm defusing a bomb. Every sentence carefully constructed to avoid any pattern that might make someone think, "Ah yes, the telltale rhythm of GPT-4." It's exhausting. I've become a linguistic contortionist, twisting my natural voice into shapes that prove I'm human.
The other day, I caught myself about to use a particular turn of phrase in an email and stopped mid-sentence. "Does that sound too AI?" I wondered. The phrase in question? "I hope this email finds you well." A perfectly normal greeting that humans have been using since emails were invented. But now it's suspect. Now it's evidence.
So I wrote "Hi" instead. Just "Hi." Because apparently that's where we are now. Stripped of our linguistic flourishes, reduced to caveman-level communication just to prove we're not robots. The irony is delicious, if only it weren't so depressing.
The Simian Friends Among Us
Here's what gets me: the people benefiting most from AI are exactly the people who shouldn't be. You know the ones. Let's call them our "simian friends" - though that's probably unfair to simians, who at least have the excuse of lacking opposable thumbs and formal education.
These are the colleagues who, three years ago, couldn't spell "separate" if their promotion depended on it. (It often did, and they still got promoted, but that's a different rant.) They'd send emails that read like they were written by someone having a minor stroke. Grammar was a suggestion. Coherence was optional. You'd get a message that said "thoughts?" and you'd think, "Yes, many, and they're all about your grasp of written English."
Now? Oh, now they're producing reports. Multi-page analyses. Executive summaries that actually summarize things. It's like watching a dog suddenly play the piano - impressive, but you know something fishy is going on.
The Copy-Paste Virtuosos
The best part - and by "best" I mean "most soul-destroying" - is watching these prompt jockeys at work. They're not even trying to hide it anymore. You'll be in a meeting and someone will say, "Give me five minutes to think about that," then return with a perfectly formatted response complete with bullet points, risk analysis, and recommendations.
Five minutes. To "think."
Sure, Deborah. You definitely pondered the strategic implications of our market positioning during your bathroom break. The fact that your response includes phrases like "leveraging synergies" and "optimizing stakeholder engagement" is pure coincidence. Never mind that yesterday you asked me how to spell "synergy."
The confidence is what kills me. They present this AI-generated slop with the conviction of someone who actually understands what they're saying. Which, spoiler alert, they don't. They can't answer follow-up questions. They get that deer-in-headlights look when you probe even slightly beneath the surface. But the initial presentation? Flawless. A perfect simulacrum of competence.
The Monkeys With Typewriters Problem
You know the old thought experiment: give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and eventually they'll produce Shakespeare. Well, we've solved that problem. It turns out you only need one monkey and one AI subscription.
The issue is that the monkey doesn't know it's Shakespeare. Hell, the monkey doesn't know it's not Shakespeare it wrote. The monkey just knows that the humans in suits nodded approvingly when it presented, so mission accomplished. Time to update LinkedIn with "Thought Leader" and "Strategic Visionary."
And here's the thing that keeps me up at night: the monkeys are winning.
They're not winning because they're producing better work. They're winning because they're producing more work. And in the modern workplace, volume has somehow become indistinguishable from value. Never mind that it's all variations on the same theme, like a cover band that only knows three chords. They're playing loud and they're playing often, and management is too busy to notice it's the same song on repeat.
When Everyone Sounds Like Everyone
Walk into any corporate environment and play a drinking game: take a shot every time you hear "circle back," "touch base," or "leverage our core competencies." You'll be unconscious before lunch.
This isn't new - corporate speak has been around forever. But AI has taken it and multiplied it by a thousand. Now it's not just the executives talking like they swallowed a business school textbook. It's everyone. The intern, the receptionist, the guy who fixes the coffee machine. Everyone's writing like they're auditioning for a TED talk.
I got an email last week from someone in facilities about a broken door. The subject line was "Strategic Infrastructure Malfunction: Action Required." The door wouldn't lock. That's it. A door. Wouldn't lock. But no, we need to "implement corrective measures" and "ensure operational continuity" and "leverage vendor partnerships" to fix it.
Just say the damn door is broken and you're calling a locksmith.
The Death of Voice
What we're losing in all this homogenization is voice. That indefinable quality that makes your writing yours. The little quirks, the personal touches, the way you'd explain something at a pub versus in a boardroom.
AI doesn't have voice. It has style, sure. It can mimic formality or casualness. But there's no personality there. No lived experience seeping through the words. No anger, no joy, no frustration, no genuine human emotion of any kind.
And when everyone uses AI to write, everyone loses their voice. We all become slight variations on the same theme. Like AI-generated art where every face has that slightly plastic quality, every piece of writing now has that slightly hollow quality. Technically correct. Completely soulless.
The Managers Who Can't Tell the Difference
You want to know the real tragedy? Half the managers can't tell the difference between AI-generated garbage and genuine work. Maybe more than half.
They see formatting and they're impressed. They see bullet points and they nod sagely. They see a recommendation section and they think "Now this is strategic thinking!" They don't actually read it. They don't evaluate whether the recommendations make sense. They don't notice that it's the same generic advice you could find in any business book from the last decade.
I've watched a manager praise a report that literally contradicted itself across three pages. But it had charts. And an executive summary. So clearly it was quality work.
This creates a perverse incentive structure where the people who can tell the difference - the ones with actual expertise - are penalized for being slower and more careful. Because careful looks the same as slow when you're measuring productivity by word count.
The Skill Trap
Here's the paradox: the more you know about a subject, the less useful AI becomes. Because you can spot the errors. You can see where it's oversimplified. You know which nuances it's missed. So you spend your time correcting it, adding context, fixing mistakes.
Meanwhile, the simian friends who know nothing about the subject? They just hit paste and walk away. And because management doesn't understand the subject either, both outputs look equally valid. Except one took 20 minutes and the other took 3 hours of careful revision.
Guess which one gets praised for efficiency?
The Actually Useful Part (Yes, Really)
Look, I'm not saying AI is useless. I use it. Daily, in fact. But I use it like a power tool, not like a replacement for knowing what I'm doing.
AI is brilliant for:
- First drafts: When you need to get ideas out quickly and don't care about quality yet
- Grunt work: Reformatting data, generating test cases, writing boilerplate code
- Research assistance: Summarizing long documents, finding relevant information (with heavy fact-checking)
- Brainstorming: Getting past writer's block, exploring different angles
AI is terrible for:
- Anything requiring expertise: If you can't evaluate the output, don't use it
- Important communications: Anything customer-facing or high-stakes needs human touch
- Original thinking: AI is derivative by nature; it can't create genuinely new ideas
- Understanding context: AI doesn't know your company culture, politics, or history
The difference between using AI well and being a simian friend with a keyboard is simple: understanding what you're outputting. If you can't explain it, defend it, or expand on it without the AI's help, you're just a fancy copy-paste machine.
What Happens Next?
I'm pessimistic about where this is heading. Not because the technology is bad, but because we're using it badly.
We're creating a workforce where appearance matters more than substance. Where the ability to prompt an AI is valued more than actual domain expertise. Where "looks professional" beats "is actually correct."
Eventually, this catches up with you. Eventually, you need someone who actually understands what they're doing. But by then, you've promoted all the simian friends and let the experts leave for companies that value expertise over output volume.
And then you're stuck with a company full of people who can generate impressive-looking reports about things they don't understand, making decisions based on AI-generated analysis they can't evaluate, solving problems they don't fully comprehend.
That's not a company. That's a cargo cult with better PowerPoint templates.
The Actually Hopeful Bit
Here's my maybe-naive hope: at some point, we'll collectively realize that the beige wall is boring as hell. That homogenization is tedious. That reading the 47th identical "thought leadership" piece makes you want to scream into the void.
Maybe we'll start valuing authenticity again. Maybe we'll recognize that genuine expertise is worth more than AI-enabled mediocrity. Maybe managers will learn to tell the difference between substance and style.
Maybe.
Or maybe we'll just keep painting everything beige and pretending it's innovation.
The Personal Bit
I started this rant talking about linguistic paranoia and I should probably close the loop. The truth is, I'm tired of second-guessing every word I write. I'm tired of the anxiety that comes from knowing that my natural writing style might be indistinguishable from a language model.
But here's what I know: I've been writing for decades. I've developed quirks, patterns, a voice that's distinctly mine (for better or worse). I use too many parentheses (see?). I go on tangents. I mix high-level concepts with crude humor. I write like I talk, which is often unprofessional and occasionally inappropriate.
That's not AI. That's me. Flawed, inconsistent, sometimes brilliant, often ridiculous, always human.
If you've read this far and think it was written by ChatGPT, well... I don't know what to tell you. Maybe feed it into an AI detector and see what happens. (Spoiler: those things are garbage and prove nothing.)
Or maybe just appreciate that we're in a weird transitional period where the question "Was this written by a human?" is even something we have to ask. Future generations will look back at this moment and think we were absolutely bonkers.
They won't be wrong.
The Bottom Line
AI is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used well or poorly. Right now, we're mostly using it poorly, because we're measuring the wrong things and rewarding the wrong behaviors.
The simian friends will keep churning out AI slop as long as management keeps praising it. The experts will keep getting frustrated as long as careful work is penalized for being slow. And everything will keep getting more beige until someone has the courage to say "This is all the same and it's all terrible."
I don't know who that someone will be. But I hope they show up soon, because I'm really tired of beige.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go second-guess every word I've written and make sure I haven't accidentally sounded too much like ChatGPT.
Because that's where we are now.
Isn't it grand?